All the Birds are Gone – Talis Kimberley

All the birds are gone, and all the stones are shaking;
On and on and on, every day in turn
What will burn, will burn, and they dare to call this ‘needful’
But the birds do not return

“All the Birds are Gone,” by Talis Kimberley

One of the things that most complicates the constant question of “what is filk, anyway?” is that filkers tend to write about things that aren’t typical filk subjects as if they were. And so you get songs like this one, which sounds like it could be about Mad Max but is really about fracking.